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Joe Chamberlain

38 of 106 portraits of Joe Chamberlain

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Joe Chamberlain

by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
carbon print, early 1890s
11 1/2 in. x 9 3/8 in. (291 mm x 237 mm)
Purchased, 1983
Photographs Collection
NPG x19813

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Eveleen Myers (née Tennant) (1856-1937), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 203 portraits, Sitter associated with 30 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Rogers, Malcolm, Camera Portraits, 1989 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 October 1989 - 21 January 1990), p. 133 Read entry

    The formidable political boss of Birmingham, Chamberlain entered national politics as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone's second administration (1880). His strongly-held radical opinions made him the enfant terrible of the Cabinet but he appeared to many to be the natural successor to Gladstone. This prize was thrown away when he and John Bright voted against their party on the Irish Home Rule bill (1886). He spent nine years in the political wilderness, until in 1895 this dedicated imperialist was appointed Colonial Secretary in Lord Salisbury's coalition government.

    Throughout his career Chamberlain was the delight of caricaturists, and his distinctive features and monocle were known throughout Europe. Eveleen Myers creates a likeness of great concentration - Chamberlain's intense glance fixed by his hypnotic monocle - the image of a political hard-hitter, 'alert, not without a pleasant squeeze of lemon, to add savour to the daily dish'. Born Eveleen Tennant, she was the beautiful daughter of cultivated well-to-do parents, and was painted by Watts and Millais. She married in 1880 F. W. H. Myers, poet and essayist, and a dedicated spiritualist who founded the Society for Psychical Research. In 1888 at their home, Leckhampton House, Cambridge, she set up a studio, and photographed many of her distinguished friends and contemporaries, as well as aesthetically posed genre studies. John Addington Symonds, writing in Sun Artists (1891), comments on 'her powers ... so marked in the direction of humanity'. Her photograph of Chamberlain is probably a little later than this article, but before 1895. Mrs Myers' sister Dorothy Tennant was married to Sir H. M. Stanley.

Events of 1890back to top

Current affairs

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, publishes In Darkest England, in which he compares the supposedly 'civilised' England with 'Darkest Africa'. A critique of the degenerate state of society, Booth also proposed social welfare schemes to alleviate the sufferings of the urban poor.
The world's first electric underground railway opens to the public in London, passing under the Thames and linking the City of London and Stockwell.

Art and science

William Morris founds the Kelmscott Press, a revival of art and craft techniques of book printing. Publications included The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896), with decorative designs and typeface by Morris and illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones.
Vincent Van Gogh dies after shooting himself in the chest in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray first appears in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine .

International

Cecil Rhodes, organiser of the diamond-mining De Beers Consolidated Mines, becomes premier of Cape Colony as part of his expansionist aims in South Africa.
In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II dismisses Otto von Bismarck.
An international anti-slavery conference is held in Brussels, leading to the signing of a treaty by all the major maritime nations covering action to be taken against the trade in Africa and suppression of it by sea.

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